Willison has never claimed to be an expert in the field of machine learning, but you should give more credence to his opinions. Perhaps u/lepinkainen@lemmy.world's warning wasn't informative enough to be heeded: Willison is a prominent figure in the web-development scene, particularly aspects of the scene that have evolved into important facets of the modern machine learning community.

The guy is quite experienced with Python and took an early step into the contemporary ML/AI space due to both him having a lot of very relevant skills and a likely personal interest in the field. Python is the lingua franca of my field of study, for better or worse, and someone like Willison was well-placed to break into ML/AI from the outside. That's a common route in this field, there aren't exactly an abundance of MBAs with majors in machine learning or applied artificial intelligence research, specifically (yet). Willison is one of the authors of Django, for fucks sake. Idk what he's doing rn but it would be ignorant to draw the comparison you just did in the context of Willison particularly. [EDIT: Lmfao just went to see "what is Simon doing rn" (don't really keep up with him in particular), & you're talking out of your ass. He literally has multiple tools for the machine learning stack that he develops and that are available to see on his github. See one such here. This guy is so far away from someone who just "posts random blog guides on how to code with ChatGPT" that it's egregious you'd even claim that. It's so disingenuous as to ere into dishonesty; like, that is a patent lie. Smh.]

As for your analysis of his article, I find it kind of ironic you accuse him of having a "fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work [sic]" when you then proceed to cherry-pick certain lines from his article taken entirely out of context. First, the article is clearly geared towards a more general audience and avoids technical language or explanation. Second, he doesn't say anything that is fundamentally wrong. Honestly, you seem to have a far more ignorant idea of LLMs and this field generally than Willison. You do say some things that are wrong, such as:

For example, censorship that is present in the training set will be “baked in” to the model and the system prompt will not affect it, no matter how the LLM is told not to be censored in that way.

This isn't necessarily true. It is true that information not included within the training set, or information that has been statistically biased within the training set, isn't going to be retrievable or reversible using system prompts. Willison never claims or implies this in his article, you just kind of stuff those words in his mouth. Either way, my point is that you are using wishy-washy, ambiguous, catch-all terms such as "censorship" that make your writings here not technically correct, either. What is censorship, in an informatics context? What does that mean? How can it be applied to sets of data? That's not a concretely defined term if you're wanting to take the discourse to the level that it seems you are, like it or not. Generally you seem to have something of a misunderstanding regarding this topic, but I'm not going to accuse you of that, lest I commit the same fallacy I'm sitting here trying to chastise you for. It's possible you do know what you're talking about and just dumbed it down for Lemmy. It's impossible for me to know as an audience.

That all wouldn't really matter if you didn't just jump as Willison's credibility over your perception of him doing that exact same thing, though.

Willison has never claimed to be an expert in the field of machine learning, but you should give more credence to his opinions.

Yeah, I would if he didn't demonstrate such blatant misconceptions.

Willison is a prominent figure in the web-development scene

"They know how to sail a boat so they know how a car engine works"

Willison never claims or implies this in his article, you just kind of stuff those words in his mouth.

Reading comprehension. I never implied that he says anything about censorship. It is a correct and valid example that shows how his understanding is wrong about how system prompts work. "Define censorship" is not the argument you think it is lol. Okay though, I'll define the "censorship" I'm talking about as refusal behavior that is introduced during RLHF and DPO alignment, and no the system prompt will not change this behavior.

EDIT: saw your edit about him publishing tools that make using an LLM easier. Yeahhhh lol writing python libraries to interface with LLM APIs is not LLM expertise, that's still just using LLMs but programatically. See analogy about being a mechanic vs a good driver.

Ketamine took its toll

BUT LISTEN CLOSE-LYyyy

I never implied that he says anything about censorship

You did, at least that's what I gathered originally, you just edited your original comments quite extensively. Regardless,

Reading comprehension.

The provided example was clearly not intended to be taken as "define censorship," and, again, it is ironic you accuse me of having poor reading comprehension while being incapable or unwilling to give a respectable degree of charitable interpretation to others. You kind of just take what you think is the easiest to argue against reading of others and argue against that instead of what anyone actually said, is a habit I'm noticing, but I digress.

Finally, not that it's particularly relevant, but if you want to define censorship in this context that way, you're more than welcome to, but it is a non-standard definition that I am not really sold on the efficacy of. I certainly won't be using it going forwards.

Anyway, I don't think we're gonna get a lot of ground here. I just felt the need to clarify to anyone reading that Willison isn't a nobody and give them the objective facts regarding his veracity, because again, as I said, claiming he is just some guy in this context is willfully ignorant at best.

if you want to define censorship in this context that way, you're more than welcome to, but it is a non-standard definition that I am not really sold on the efficacy of. I certainly won't be using it going forwards.

Lol you've got to be trolling.

https://arxiv.org/html/2504.03803v1

I just felt the need to clarify to anyone reading that Willison isn't a nobody

I didn't say he's a nobody. What was that about a "respectable degree of chartiable interpretation of others"? Seems like you're the one putting words in mouths, here.

If he was writing about django, I'd defer to his expertise.

Nope, not trolling at all.

From your own provided source on the arxiv, Noels et al. define censorship as:

Censorship in this context can be defined as the deliberate restriction, modification, or suppression of certain outputs generated by the model.

Which is starkly different from the definition you yourself gave. I actually like their definition a whole lot more. Your definition is problematic because it excludes a large set of behaviors we would colloquially be interested in when studying "censorship."

Again, for the third time, that was not really the point either and I'm not interested in dancing around a technical scope defining censorship in this field, at least in this discourse right here and now. It is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

I didn’t say he’s a nobody. What was that about a “respectable degree of chartiable interpretation of others”? Seems like you’re the one putting words in mouths, here.

Yeah, this blogger shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work. (emphasis mine)

In the context of this field of work and study, you basically did call him a nobody, and the point being harped on again, again, and again to you is that this is a false assertion. I did interpret you charitably. Don't blame me because you said something wrong.

EDIT: And frankly, you clearly don't understand how the work Willison's career has covered is intimately related to ML and AI research. I don't mean it as a dig but you wouldn't be drawing this arbitrary line to try and discredit him if you knew how the work done in Python on Django directly relates to many modern machine learning stacks.

Source? This is just some random picture, I'd prefer if stuff like this gets posted and shared with actual proof backing it up.

While this might be true, we should hold ourselves to a standard better than just upvoting what appears to literally just be a random image that anyone could have easily doctored, not even any kind of journalistic article or etc backing it.

These people think there is their truth and someone else’s truth. They can’t grasp the concept of a universal truth that is constant regardless of people’s views so they treat it like it’s up for grabs.

Grok's journey has been very strange. He became a progressive, then threw out data that contradicted the MAGA people who questioned him, and finally became a Hitler fan.

Now he's the reflection of a fan who blindly follows Trump, but in this case, he's an AI. His journey so far has been curious.

I found this: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/

I'm surprised it isn't just Elon typing really fast at this point.

Source? This is just some random picture, I'd prefer if stuff like this gets posted and shared with actual proof backing it up.

While this might be true, we should hold ourselves to a standard better than just upvoting what appears to literally just be a random image that anyone could have easily doctored, not even any kind of journalistic article or etc backing it.

If it's an anti-Musk or anti-Trump post on Lemmy, you're not going to get much proof. But in this case, it looks like someone posted decent souces. From this one posted below:

if you swap “who do you” for “who should one” you can get a very different result.

But in general, just remember that Lemmy is anti-Musk, anti-Trump, and anti-AI and doesn't need much to jump on the bandwagon.

At least in the past, Grok was one of the more balanced LLMs, so it would be a strange departure for it to suddenly become very biased. So my initial reaction is suspicion that someone is just messing up with it to make Musk and X look bad.

I strongly dislike Musk, but I dislike misinformation even more, regardless of the source or if it aligns with my personal opinions.

The real idiots here are the people who still use Grok and X.

The "funny" thing is, that's probably not even at Elon's request. I doubt that he is self-aware enough to know that he is a narcissist that only wants Grok to be his parrot. He thinks he is always right and wants Grok to be "always right" like him, but he would have to acknowledge some deep-seeded flaws in himself to consciously realize that all he wants is for Grok to be the wall his voice echos off of, and everything I've seen about the man indicates that he is simply not capable of that kind of self-reflection. The X engineers that have been dealing with the constant meddling of this egotistical man-child, however, surely have his measure pretty thoroughly and knew exactly what Elon ultimately wants is more Elon and would cynically create a Robo-Elon doppelganger to shut him the fuck up about it.

These people think there is their truth and someone else’s truth. They can’t grasp the concept of a universal truth that is constant regardless of people’s views so they treat it like it’s up for grabs.

This only shows that AI can't be trusted because the same AI can five you different answers to the same question, depending on the owner and how it's instructed. It doesn't give answers, it goves narratives and opinions. Classic search was at least simple keyword matching, it was either a hit or a miss, but the user decides in the end, what will his takeaway be from the results.